A mother looks into her child's eyes and finds her own life looking back. That small reversal drives the whole poem. The title, "Mother: Through her eyes," seems to promise a portrait of a mother as someone else sees her, yet the speaker is the mother herself, speaking to a "darling" and seeing her past through the child's gaze. Judging by the title's "her," the child is probably a daughter, though the poem never says so. The central idea is that a child is more than someone loved: she is a mirror and a continuation, summed up in "I can see me in you, because you are a part of me."
The first three stanzas move through the body from the outside in. Eyes come first, and they hold "places and years I've been through" and "my own life with its many shades." "Shades" turns memory into colour, and "smile and tears" admits that what the mother sees reflected is not all happy. Next come the "little hands," where she feels "my own strength and weakness." That is a neat paradox, because a tiny hand is neither strong nor weak itself. The feeling lives in the mother holding it "next to mine," which makes the difference in size and the likeness visible together. By stanza three we have reached "heart to heart," the deepest layer.
Here the grammar changes gear. "Shared," "Dreamt" and "Sang" pile up like a list of everything a mother and child can do together, and each is stretched wide: "secrets of the untold story," "dreams I dare to have," "every song of heaven and earth." The first phrase is quietly contradictory, since a story with shared secrets is hardly untold. It suggests a private history that belongs only to these two. "Heaven and earth" simply means everything, and its grand wording shows the poem reaching for a size of feeling that ordinary words struggle to hold.
Then the child asks, "How much I love you?" The question comes twice, with "O and now you ask me darling" working as a refrain, a breath taken before answering. The mother never gives a quantity. She offers evidence instead, looping back to before the child was born. The baby "listened to my beating heart" from inside the womb, while the mother was "pouring love" and "spending all the strength for you to carry on." "Spending" treats love as something that costs, and it echoes the "strength" of the second stanza. "Heart to heart" is now literal: two heartbeats, one inside the other.
The final answer is an identity, not a number: you are "a part of my heart and soul, with all the love of life could bear." The line drops a word ("all the love that life could bear"), and the gap lets two meanings float, either as much love as life can hold or as much as life can endure. Either way, love is measured at the limit of living. The closing "I can see me in you" also returns to the opening "I can see," so the poem ends where it began, looking into the child's face.
The form is loose. There is no regular rhyme scheme and no steady metre. The lines run to the length of speech, and the punctuation is relaxed: stanza two ends without a full stop, and capital letters come and go. Four stanzas have four lines, but the fourth stretches to five, as if the speaker cannot contain what she is spending. Sound does its work through pairs instead of rhyme: "smile and tears," "heaven and earth," "heart and soul."
The poem does not say anything startling about motherhood, and a few phrases, like "songs of heaven and earth," lean on familiar wording. Its interest lies in its angle. Love appears as recognition rather than declaration, and the question "how much?" is answered by a refusal to count. It shows how a plain-spoken poem can build its shape from repetition and a single reversed viewpoint.